Telling the children

I first noticed the news early Thursday when I checked my email before waking the kids - Yahoo had two stories on it, which seemed excessive, but (I processed slowly), yes, this actually did seem kind of a big deal. Biggish. I still didn't think about telling the kids until M. called from Canada, to make sure we were all right  and for reassurance, to touch base, the way people do in the wake of something awful.

"Why'd dad call?" Helen asked, sensing a shift in tone right away. It was a perfect segue. I bailed.

"Just to let us know when he'll be home," I said. "Dinnertime tomorrow, yay!"

I thought again about telling them as I drove to camp, except that it didn't seem quite right - oh bytheway here's this totally disturbing thing that will freak you the freak out, have a good day at camp & don't forget sunscreen, love ya, bye! - so I didn't.

I admit also that I couldn't figure out the right tone. Matter-of-fact is my default mode, and it would work in this situation, except just the fact of giving an event attention in the bright sunshiny morning before heading off to camp elevates the telling from matter-of-fact to Big News in Hushed Tones, which is the parental conversational mode I find most difficult.

So I bailed, which, I realized immediately afterward, meant that they were thus going to find out from other kids or their grandma. Normal Big Events this would be fine/ unavoidable, but I was belatedly understanding that this might not be a Normal Big Event.

Si heard about it in camp - he's doing a middle school basketball camp where the coaches pride themselves in showing impressionable preteens the right path to manhood, and they took it upon themselves to bring it up and have a group discussion and probably do some prayer, which I appreciate, even though that's not the thing we do at our house.

Helen's camp didn't bring it up. She first heard about it when she and Si turned on the TV at grandma's, looking for cartoons, and stumbled immediately into Hour Nine of the Live Coverage. It didn't maybe help that grandma wanted to keep watching, like just fifteen minutes - it was on every channel!  "Helen was very upset," she reported later. Uh, you think?

So: parenting fail. I think she'll be fine - yes, she screamed when someone selling Dish TV knocked on the door after dinner, and at bedtime she didn't want to be farther than arm's length from me - but such jumpiness is normal, and would have happened however she'd found out. This thing is seriously disturbing, after all. I don't think I'm going to be blithely entering a movie theater anytime soon, and I wouldn't be surprised if seven-year-olds around the entire Denver metro area were a skittish about movie going for months.

Still. I skim over the articles like "Theater shooting aftermath: Tips for Helping Children Cope" and mostly what I think is, this doesn't apply to us. Even though actually, this time, it kind of does. I get irascible when the Grandma calls at 9:30 at night to remind me that what the networks are saying is to remind kids that this is an isolated incident, very rare, and that it's still safe to go to movies, "So be sure to tell her that." (Appreciate the thought, but I'll come up with own language for reassurance, thanks.) I hug the kids and ask how they're feeling ("Fine," says my noncommunicator, manfully. "I'm skeeeered," says the other, maaaybe playing up the dramatic excitement of the situation and the chance to sleep on mama's floor just a smidgen.) I remind them that they're safe, even if they are sleeping on mama's floor and not in mama's bed. I limit news coverage to None. We read extra chapters in Ramona, where things like this don't happen.

In the end, I don't worry so much about what I can control, or even the big obvious things that I can't. I'm going to lose more sleep fretting over the sadness of the people killed than fretting that something like this could happen to us, for example.

No, I worry about what I still have trouble with: the fact that other people are going to interrupt my reaction and my kids' reaction to what's going on and bring their own brand of tragedy processing to the table. Some people are going to be process-by-talking-about-it (Hellooo, MIL!). Some are going to be process-by-dismissing-it (Helloo, FIL!). Some people are going to be process-by-trying-to-control-the-narrative, which is what upsets me the most. It's like that time in kindergarten when my best friend kept telling me these horror stories - child crushed to death by a circus elephant, school bus overtaken by bees - and then insisting that they were not only true but local. Every time I talked to her I got more upsetting news about The Way The World Is, even though we were living in the same world. It took me until high school to learn how to avoid people like this, and even now I have trouble processing when someone I work with or do kid things with has a really opposite opinion of how the world operates.

But for now this isn't the issue, I don't think. For now it's fine to stick with my small-but-sturdy toolbox of coping mechanisms - listening, avoiding, and remembering that things are mostly good most of the time - and to let the kids who need it sleep on the floor.

A time to sow

It's been so grim and snowy this week that it's hard to remember, exactly, but this past weekend was sunny and warm so we planted seeds. Well, some of us planted seeds. Others went skiing.

[insert stock photo of skiing in the cloudy gray snow here]

First we went to the plant store, where in addition to seed-starting soil I was somehow convinced to buy a houseplant. Do you know what we need? Not house plants. But after looking at every. single. thing. in the blessed store, my resistance was worn down. Also, frank admission: plants and books are the two things to which I am unable to say no in a retail situation. Related: we also came home with kale seeds. Where, exactly, will I be planting these seeds? No idea. But it was that new (to me) dinosaur kale. I couldn't resist.

As we were driving away, Helen perked up and said that she was just happy because she'd finally gotten a pet. She wanted to get a mouse that day and, indeed, I can testify: she was very, very mad about the non-mouse situation about 45 minutes earlier. But now, she said, she was okay, because she had Cactey.

Helen's new pet. I think it qualifies as my Favorite Kid Pet EVAH.

Long live Cactey!

And also Cacto. He has two bodies.

Afterwards, we put the seed-starting soil into trays. "We," I say. Helen put in two scoops, decided it was too messy, and went off to introduce Cactey to her toys.

Ready for seeds. Possibly the most boring picture ever.

She was also only interested in putting her own seeds into her own pots, although I have to say, even though she is seven and much less likely these days to knock everything to the floor, I really prefer it that way. I'm all for introducing children to the miracle of planting in theory, but when the seeds hit the pots it turns out that I actually don't like to relinquish control. I have similar problems sharing the joys of baking.

Here come the seeds.

She planted pansies. I planted two kinds of basil, four kinds of tomato, lovage, summer savory, leeks, and marjoram. A few of these seeds were bought for our very first garden, back in 1998, and while I'm unable to throw them out they usually end up just fertilizing the pots for another round of another type of seed. Their viability's not what it used to be. I try to plant a lot, partly to improve the chances of germination and partly to just use them up so I can start over.

No, I don't watch that show Hoarders. Why do you ask?

Helen also went to a birthday at Canvas and Cocktails. I'm not sure what kind of cocktails they served but she did come home with a canvas:

Still life with painter.

Detail. Note the black widow on your right (crawling up the stem).

On Monday Si got very grumpy and wanted M. to take Helen to gymnastics, while he and I got to stay home alone. So I can watch you play Wii? I asked without the faaaintest hint of bitterness. He nodded gloweringly. I ended up forgoing that pleasure, but did promise that the two us would do something just the two of us, very soon. I also am trying one last reading-aloud book with him (The Sword in the Stone). He tolerates this so long as it doesn't interfere with his own reading time. That works for me.

Middle Earth

We've moved into November, real fall, the kind with long brown days and freezing nights and sodden clumps of mush where we didn't manage to rake all the leaves before the snow fell. The kids have had the barfing sickness, mostly in our bedroom, which means that our once new rug is no longer safe to do pushups on. The mountains are brilliant white and, thanks to the advent of Daylight Spending Time, my morning run happens at sunrise, which is a beautiful thing. We are as crazy as elves (and not because we're planning ahead for the buying season. As IF.) 

The news from home is bad, and I have been exerting a lot of mental energy to reset my expectations re my mother and the future. Some days I am a mess, but mostly I am melancholy but serene, even happy. The kids and their day-to-day emergencies keep me constantly in the present; the mostly up tenor of their days makes mine up, too. One of my holds at the library comes in, or I get a new idea about a story that I'm s-l-l-l-o-w-l-y working on, or the kids have a good day at school, or my morning run is white and pink and beautiful, and I feel happy, like the world is going well, more or less. Then I remember: no, it is so, so not.

Other times, I will even be sanguine about the so-not-ness. My mom feels fine, after all. I could pick up the phone and call her right now, except that she'd probably be out for a walk with my dad. Things are at-this-moment okay, and new therapies offer so much promise. You hear all the time about remissions that last for decades--maybe it will in this case. Why not?

And then I lie down at the end of the day, and I do that calming thing where I spread my mind over all the people in my life and mentally tuck them in and smooth their foreheads, make sure they're okay--all my chickens under one roof, even if that roof is the wide-open sky of the Midwest--and my hand catches: no. Not everyone is okay. Not at all.

Or I will be fine until I come across a calendar, and my mind is forced into dangerous places, like This Time Next Year. Or the work meeting I go to this spring in Minnesota--how will things be then? Or the baseball meet Si has in June--what will conditions be at that time? Or the 2013 work meeting. Or--and then I shut it down, quick. Because I can't imagine that. No. Better to think about the end of the month, the plans we have to ski in a couple of weeks, the benefits form that has to be turned in next week, the fish I need to remember to pick up for dinner, the email I have to write.

And then I turn to the nearest kid and hug them hard, until they can squirm away.

Tom Sawyer and Mary Lennox

I don't consider myself a heliocopter parent (smugly so, I might add), and then I notice myself doing things like checking the 5th-grade website five times a day (still not updated for the new week) (I HATE that). In my defense I'll insist that I'm just curious and I have NO INTENTION of discussing the contents/ activities with either my fifth grader or his teacher.


(Total lie, BTW. I'll "discuss" it with Si, and the conversation will go something like this:

Me: Hey, I noticed that you guys are reading ___.
Si: (crickets chirping)
Me: (slightly aggrieved whisper) Si. That was kind of a question.
Si: What? Oh. Yeah, we are.
Me: And what do you think? Do you like it?
Si: (shrugs) Mm hmm.
Me: (kicking self for asking a yes-or-no question) What's it about?
Si: Um. This guy does this thing, and then he has a dog, and then he does something, I don't remember what, and then he does this other thing. He rides the bus, I think.
Me: Oh. What's your favorite part?
Si: (raising his face to the ceiling and speaking in a just-end-this-conversation-NOW monotone): I like it ALLLLL.

Meanwhile, I ask Helen on the third day of school what she did in class today (this is after we reviewed in detail all the important parts of the day, such as recess, the other recess, lunch, and specials). She sighs noisily and says, "We just did the USUAL STUFF, MOM."

In summary: I have NO BLOODY IDEA what either of my children are doing in school. Hence my obsessive refreshing of the 5th grade website.


This is one reason I like reading to them at the end of the day so much. At least that's one thing that's going into their brains that I'm involved in. Also, I've said this before, but reading kids' books is one of the main reasons I had kids. As soon as Si reaches a non-read-aloud-to-age--like, gasp, 11--I'm going to have to insist that he start reproducing, so that by the time Helen is too old to read to, I'll have a read-aloud partner again. Although the catch will be that I'll have to read a bunch of the same books instead of all new material. Already I'm on reread #2 of The Secret Garden--there could be worse books to reread twice in two years, of course, but I find myself throwing longing glances at Pippi Longstocking and the Moomintroll books.

Si and I are reading Tom Sawyer, and we're both more-or-less enjoying it. This is one of those books that I wanted to read less because I lovity-loved it as a child (I didn't, and I still don't--Tom is kind of vain and self-aggrandizing, and the book is a little heavy on the adult-directed cultural commentary for either my taste or Si's) than because it's an Essential Book. You might think, from this statement, that I'm a canon-driven, reading-is-good-for-your-character kind of pedant, and, well, you'd be right. In my defense, I'm doing it because someone has to. His school favors dreary, good-for-you Cultural Context/ Sensitivity Training books, and he favors series. Both of these are fine, but they tend to omit or elide certain aspects of real life. Such as: one of the things I like about Tom Sawyer this time around is that it shows girls and boys living in entirely separate, mutually antagonistic worlds. Sure, Tom likes Becky Thatcher (that part is kind of weird, actually), but they aren't friends. Almost every other kid book in the world is based on a dual girl-and-boy hero/heroine set, and they're usually best pals and completely support each other. Which is a nice model. It also doesn't exist for kids over the age of 6, as far as I can tell.

Also, Tom's friends are both his bosom pals and...kind of based on opportunistic serendipity. They aren't friends because they really understand each other, or have long heart-to-heart conversations, or show up on the doorstep bearing comic books and bubblegum when the other guy is sick. No, they're friends because they happen to be in the same place at the same time and like to play the same things. Or they're friends because they totally envy the other guy's set-up (see Tom's affection for Huck: is it Huck he likes, or the fact that Huck doesn't have to go to school or bed or church? And does he even get Huck? I don't think he does. Camping out on the island with stolen food is a lark for Tom but pretty SOP for Huck, and it's not at all clear that Tom understands that this is what Huck's life is like all the time.) But none of this stuff matters: they're friends, or buddies, or whatever, and that's all they need. Whenever I stare at Si's roster of hero-worship friends, neighborhood pals, baseball buddies and other opportunistic associations and wonder what the hell friendship even means for him, it helps to remember Tom Sawyer.

Three...two...one...

For his daily writing assignment so that his writing muscles don't atrophy, I asked Silas to write about what he was looking forward to most about school. Here's what he wrote:


It has been a long, boring summer. Camp, horseback riding, fishing, Legos, a trip to Yellowstone, fishing, playing with friends, sleepovers, a sleepover party, homemade ice cream, homemade popsicles, pool, cousin time, grandparent time, crawdad fishing, biking the neighborhood, zoo, museum, more Legos...

Thank god that's over and he can finally DO something all day. Well, six hours of the day, at least.

Meanwhile, Helen and Mary, her doll, are both looking forward to starting first grade.

We visited the Denver Doll and Toy Museum to celebrate (and also because The Boys went to the Rockies game).

Last days of summer

Summer is such a schizophrenic time for me. On the one hand, I wake up at five thirty and run, shower and go to work, the same as I do every other frigging day of the year. On the other hand, the house is filled with long lazy days and unfulfilled desires and endless, endless fights over who gets to have a playdate or who is touching whose Legos. I get home and the heat and need to loaf hit me like a wave, but then there is no loafing, because however leisurely the kids might feel themselves, they don't really share that feeling with others, and monitoring them is a fulltime job and M has been up in his ears with it for the past nine hours and it's my turn now and also everyone is hunnnngrrry. So like every other mother on the planet I am looking forward with panting enthusiasm to the first day of school. I am also trying to wring every last drop of summer from this month. Thus this weekend I spent in a frenzy of yard work, and then took the kids (and my parents, who are visiting in order to help us with the last critical week before school starts) to do two installments of our summer Park Project.

The pavilion at Cheesman Park

The Park project is where we visit Denver parks, investigate their offerings, and fill out a little survey sheet.

Helen gave the fountains top marks but found the playground average at best.

The survey sheets are more to make it official than anything else (well, I think Silas secretly loves them. They fulfill his need for order). Otherwise we're just visiting parks and testing the playgrounds. These were our second and third parks; last time we went to Observatory Park, which still earns top marks from both kids (the observatory. Not many parks can boast a functional observatory, and the fact that it was closed on the day we visited probably made it even more desirable. The mysteries of the stars, etc., as opposed to the pain in the neck of peering through a telescope at tiny swimming pinpricks that, we're assured, are VERY IMPORTANT.)

Si tested the pavilion for scooter worthiness.
The playground was serviceable. Although less so for proto teens.

I'm hoping to visit at least one more park before the summer's really done (probably not before school starts, though, which means not before baseball and soccer start in earnest, so really, who am I kidding? Life, which has been pretending to be busy all summer, is about to crank into high gear.)

Smith Lake at Washington Park.

For me, the Park Project has been an excuse to visit places I've meant to go for three years and explore the city we sort of live in a little more. It's both satisfying and sad. I wish that I could have been doing this all summer, for one thing. And it makes me think of all the other things I wish I was doing with the kids, and how I desperately wish I could have the summers off, and how the kids are growing up and already Si is almost too old to be read aloud to (one of the main reasons I had kids, already phasing itself out! Why go on?). I get this rushing, panicky sense of needing to do it all now and maximize this day, this week, this time of their lives.

I have to forcibly sit down sometimes, and remember: in twenty years (in five years), the details won't matter. Their childhood will have become just that--the thing they have, imperfect, marked by expediency and what-we-happened-to-have-on-hand-at-the-time-ism--and it will be enough. Really. It will. Even if they don't learn Spanish.

I survived my son's first sleepover party

and all I got was this little frisson of social anxiety.

Si's birthday celebration choice was to have seven, or eight, or maybe nine--"let me look through the school directory again real quick, Mom"--of his closest friends over for a sleepover. On his actual birthday, which did fall on a Monday this year, meaning, for the record, on a work night, and for the record let me also come right out and admit that I agreed to this arrangement. I'm not sure where in this process I conveniently forgot that this was insane.

Luckily--luckily--only four friends plus his cousin actually attended, so we had a total of six boys, who created a din that even a sleep-deprived and increasingly c-r-a-b-b-y adult could talk over when necessary (and oh, was it necessary). The night's first plan, the campout, had to be abruptly called off at 11:30 pm when the boys could not stop hootling (but there was toothpaste! in our tent!!). Plan B, which would have been nice, involved boys sleeping on couches and rugs. One solitary boy opted for this plan until 12:30 or so, when he gave up trying to sleep and asked to go home (M walked him home). Plan C involved legos, the basement, me trying to lay down the law and Silas protesting, "But it's a sleepover, Mom! That's what we DO on a sleepover!" and a very loud fan in our room. I was glad that the house was still standing in the morning and I reminded myself that Si and his friends will probably *not* be the types you can trust not to hold a Facebook rave at your house when you're out of town. Just for future reference, self.

However, now that I have caught up on my sleep and can reflect in peace, what the sleepover was the most was educational, with the topic of learning being pre-middle-school politics. Whenever the boys were eating they would talk, mostly trash talk, mostly about girls. ("P--- totally has a crush on me. It's so gross. Whenever I'm like delivering papers to her house she's all like, 'Hiiiii, I---, how arrrrre you.'" "Oh, I know! M--- has a crush on me! It's like awful! She's always asking to be in my group and stuff!") It was all chaste, thank GOD because if it wasn't I'd have felt pressured to intervene in some way. As it was, it was interesting to see who in the group held social dominance, who was observant enough of other kids' behavior to report on it and speculate about motives, and what they thought those motives were. It was also interesting to see who listened with big ears but didn't really participate. Si, for example, while he seems to have a relatively middle-to-high social status (this was a little hard to read at the party, since he was the host), didn't chime in with the trash talk at all. Oh, he listened, and laughed and groaned in all the right places. But he didn't have any stories about girls having a crush on him. (And although the fact that his MOM was washing dishes five feet away may have influenced the stories he chose to tell, this behavior tallies pretty well with the Silas I know and also my own personal growing-up self. I've never been very good at gossiping--oh, I can say the offhand snarky thing and/or put my foot in my mouth just like anyone else. But I've never been able to rivet others with stories of known-to-both third parties. In fact, Silas's game cluelessness about social snarkiness felt so familiar that for a little while I forgot that I'm a grownup and my own cluelessness doesn't matter any more.)

And when the kids were not eating, they played games, which was almost worse. Cops and robbers, mostly, only the group was lopsidedly distributed and COINCIDENTALLY the smallest, most outsiderest kids were the ones who had to be the cops when everyone played NOTIT and also had to use crutches and sticks as weapons instead of real nerf dart guns ("If this was real, the cops would TOTALLY have real guns," protested one cop-by-fiat, to which the robbers said, "But this is just a game." Which seemed to be kind of missing the point in a deliberate way.) In fact, the cops and robbers game was so on-the-edge with leftoutness that I called it off early (by using my sweet-yet-strict teacher's voice to instantly quell the meanies--I mean, ha ha, by ordering pizza. I had no other trick in my kid crowd control repertoire--clearly mistake #53 of the evening.)

Ugh. Basically it was fine. The kids were overall well-behaved and mostly followed directions and it is always illuminating to see which kids have the best manners training. I would do it again. In ten years or so.

Holy Horse, the Kid is Ten

As of seven minutes ago, I have officially been a parent for a whole dang decade. That's a lot. That's also, as Si will soon be but is not yet irritated with me enough to point out, me making someone else's big event all about me.

When it's obviously all about this guy.

I left the house this morning before he woke up, but I've been in touch several times since then to a) wish him a happy birthday; b) receive last-minute instructions on what to pick up as party favors on the way home; c) receive modifications of those last-minute instructions based on a late-breaking cancellation; and d) receive notification that his great-aunt's birthday card had arrived in the mail--"She said that she's going to retire this year and come visit us," he announced. "I want to see her again."

"Me too, kiddo. I hope she does come visit."

"...And? She sent me a gift card? Not just to a place but a visa card? For one. zero. zero. In my haaaannnnd!"

"That's awesome!"

"I know. That's all I had to say. Bye, mom."

For someone who's been keeping close watch on his earnings lately and making plans as to how to best invest those earnings in Lego products, that's a whole lot of present.

When I did become a parent all those years ago, and in fact for several years before, this was the time I imagined. The ten-year-old times. This is the age when, according to Dr. Spock (I think), kids have the personality that most closely matches who they'll be as adults.

If that's the case, Si as an adult will be the kind of guy who says his idea of a great Friday night is to spend it at home with a close friend and a good book. Or a good video game. He'll like things to be neat and organized, although he will continually be surprised and vexed when they don't get that way on their own. He'll be good at getting his work done efficiently and going home--I'm guessssing he won't be an 80-hour-a-week kind of guy. He's not really a striver--somewhat at odds with his tendency to insist on being the one with the remote, but hey, that's what his teenage years are for. To work out the kinks.

He'll be kind, and funny, and not a complainer. He'll like making people laugh, but not necessarily being the center of attention. He'll be a man I'm glad to know.

Happy birthday, kiddo. It's been a good ten years.

Brief update

So, we went camping last weekend. We forgot our sleeping bags and ketchup for the hot dogs; it was hot and dusty until it got really very cold, and when we got home there was an entire weekend's worth of chores to do, plus extra laundry and dishes from the camping. Nonetheless it was wonderful and I enjoyed every minute of it, except perhaps the moment we made the discovery about the sleeping bags ("Oh what a SHAME!" cried Helen and collapsed in misery.)

The kids spent almost every minute climbing in the rocks behind camp

except when they were geocaching

or melting their matchbox cars in the fire. Helen was well-dressed throughout, except when wearing her hot polyester nightgown. Silas was basically invisible, except when waving from some high rock. I read, and cooked a bit, and tried to nap (too hot). The mosquito level was fine.

Chore report

Well, the first shaky/whiny/frantic (how will we DO it all) week of summer has passed, and naturally we haven't actually carved out any sort of routine that makes sense, but things do seem less frantic. The kids are in their school daycare program for part of this week (rather more dismal than not, with full-group punishments for untattled transgressions and a distinct limit on outdoor time), and then onto their aunt's for hedonistic fun, sun & legos. I'd feel worse about the school daycare except that it is looking to be about 6 days total of the whole summer, maybe less, and one day of each of those is a swimming day (for which I say, Better you than me, daycare, and also: good luck!) Meanwhile, M and I are both getting a decent amount of work done and not feeling too compromised, and the kids...well, they'll be fine. If I were home full time they would get more sleep, but they would also spend more hours of the day engaged in saying "I want a PLAYYYYDAAAAATE" and "Is it ten yet? Is it ten yet? Is it ten yet?" and "I want to go swimmmmiiing" and probably a lot of "It's not FAAAAIIIRR." So. And they would DEFINITELY spend less time at the pool, per visit (they were there for THREE HOURS. As IF).

We're taking advantage of the summer schedule to work a few more chores into the kid routine. This has had mixed success. To elaborate:

1. Success: lawn mowing. Silas mows the lawn now. He gets five dollars if he mows the lawn without requiring nagging. If I have to remind him more than cursorily, he gets $4. If I have to do it myself, he gets nothing (obv). So far (for three weeks) this has worked quite well, and for the first time since owning a lawn I do not regularly have to mow it. Yessss.

2. Fail: getting the kids to pick up after themselves/ pick up activities before moving on to the next activity. This pretty much does not happen without M or I standing over them saying "and now THAT lego, please. No, don't build with it. Just put it in the box." The summer is young, however.

3. Mixed: dishes. We don't really have a fixed schedule for this, so the kids always feel like we spring it on them at the end of a long day ("I see you're tired and just want to play wii--how 'bout you load the dishwasher instead?") However, they've gotten to where they (mostly) remember to put their dishes on the counter, and if we prompt gently, into the dishwasher.

4. Mixed: room cleaning. We have a fixed schedule--every weekend, they have to clean and vacuum their rooms--but there is so much variation in the definition of clean (floor only, or surfaces too? bed made? do the shelves/desk need to be organized? what about that drawer of doom which is crammed so full of crap that it barely opens--yet which seems to contain many critical items, such as allowance and favorite hair thingies?), plus "weekend" is such a long, leisurely span of time that it's easy to find ourselves at 8:15 on a Sunday night without it having managed to happen at all, that this chore seems to involve more than its fair share of stomping and flinging oneself to the floor, or shocking requests to delay completion/ solicit help.

5. Mixed-to-success: putting away laundry. Sometimes I put a basket of clean, folded laundry in a kid's room and it is whisked away into drawers as if by magic. Other times I find myself tripping on it three days in a row as it first gets rifled for preferred clean clothes and then, confusingly, overpiled with freshly dirty clothes. In either case, I would like to involve the kids in this chore earlier.

We're trying. Ideally, I'd like all chores to be like the lawn mowing, in that they're required to happen, but my needing to remind kids to do them has been cleverly excised from the process. In other words, I'd like a little more ownership of the chore process from the children. I remind them frequently of that study from Harvard about how the kids who made the happiest adults were those who were required to do chores as children; however, I suspect this invigorating story translates to kidspeak something like this: "blah blah blah blah no, you can't play Wii now blah blah blah blah."

Landing on Mars

The other day, the family got to talking about space exploration and progress and how no one has ever been to Mars--yet.

"But they will, soon, though," said Si.

"Yes, they probably will--I bet in your lifetime people will land on Mars," said M.

"And I'll get to watch it! On HDTV 5!!!"

Pause. Cough. "Or, you know, you could BE one of the people who lands on Mars," said M, mildly.

"Oh. Yeah. I guess I could," said Si. Pause. "Or I could watch it on TEEVEE!"

My son: not a bold adventurer. Also, I think the prospect of imagining himself as an adult is not that thrilling to him. He'll watch the Mars landing on TV because that's what kids do, and he's a kid. The idea that someday he might be 35 and an astronaut doesn't really fit into his brain.

In contrast, Helen loves to imagine herself and everyone else older--"when he is 13, how old will I be? Nine? I'm going to be nine years old? Will he be in high school? Where will I be? THIRD grade?"

Even she, though, delighted to imagine, dedicated to improving herself at any skill that gets thrown her way ("Once I get over my fears, right, Mom?")--even she can't really picture herself on Mars. I mean, currently she's jump-jump-jump-jump roping up and down the sidelines at a baseball game, wearing a sleeveless dress and shouting "I'm toast! I'm a piece of TOAST!" while everyone around her huddles in blankets and down jackets--but if I were to entice her inside with some markers and give her a writing prompt, "How would I get to Mars?"--even she probably wouldn't come up with a drawing where she spends eight to twelve years in school, loading up on math and technology courses while angling viciously for those key summer internships at Lockheed Martin and NASA and engaging in competitive personal sports activities to prove her moral and physical fitness for the task.

I mean, that's the whole disconnect problem with careers, right? Si is probably right not to imagine himself too far--I suspect he intuits a lot more about the adult world than he lets on, and knows he's better off getting to it when he gets to it.

Or maybe that's what I tell myself since that's what I did, and now look at me. In complete professional fulfillment. Now I write things like this (warning: clicking here will violate the thin veneer of anonymity preserved on this blog--so, er, proceed accordingly).

Life with a Fourth Grader

Saying goodbye to his best friend: “See you Monday! Unless my house gets hit by a giant meteor!”

Friend: “Or someone drops a nuclear bomb on you!”

Silas: “Or World War Three starts!”

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At bedtime: he sets up his big fluffy white bear next to him in the bed, the self-holding ammo nerf dart gun propped in its paws. “To protect me from monsters,” he explains, matter-of-factly.

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Skiing: proceeding down the mountain at what could generously be called a conservative pace, he notes how much faster he is, now that dad’s taught him “that thing with the turn.”

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When he gets mad at us, he storms into his room and turns up the volume on the only CD he owns: Beethoven’s greatest hits. Heh.

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When problems arise, he takes matters into his own hands and often prevails. Except when he spectacularly doesn’t. See: attempt to remove superglue from beautiful new dining room table.

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He can be stunningly responsible, like when he packed school lunch for himself and Helen the morning I was out of town and M was still in bed. He included fruit! And carrots and snap peas!

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He comes into my new office/ hotel room/ etc. and within two minutes has discovered two drawers I never noticed, found the keys, locked them and unlocked them, and set the TV to some channel I'm not interested in. "Aigh! Don't MESS with everything!" I say, but don't press it, because, really, he's fine. Moving a million miles and hour and getting into everything, but fine.

Sometimes, raising him, I feel like I don’t really have a plan—like I’m not trying to shape him and guide him the way I ought to be, that I harp too much on low-consequence stuff, like video game time and the ratio of carrots to goldfish in his diet and not enough on helping him improve his friendship abilities or his staying power or his internal motivation. Other times I think I have too many goals for him, that I don’t listen hard enough to what he’s trying to be.

Other times, I think: he's fine. Just keep on going, and things will be fine.

Leaping, plus updates

When the kids were little, I remember their development would come in spurts--one day they'd be serenely practicing their "ba" sounds, in long unrelated streams of babble, and the next they'd wake up and say "dog" and be making signs for "flower" and "please" and "MORE NOW." This still happens, only we call it "mood," as in, "Wow, Si's mood is terrific today! He cleaned his room without being asked and played with Helen and finished his homework lickity split." Helen had a growth moment over the weekend, and even though she gets embarrassed and shouts MOM DON'T SAY THAT whenever I praise her about it, I can't help myself. We had to go to the store on Saturday, and she offered to go if we could walk/ scooter (gasp) (this from the girl who two days before had a crying fit because I hadn't parked the car close enough to the school for her to roll from the Sock Hop to her carseat). So I said yes, of course, even though it was the main grocery trip and I'd have to lug home all the cereal boxes and milk jugs and etc. Then on the way home, after I'd had to stop for the eighteenth time to adjust the damn cereal boxes, which were spilling out onto the sidewalk, she spun back on her scooter and said, "Can I help? I can carry a bag."

"Oh, that's sweet of you," I said. "But these are really heavy."

"I can take one," she said decisively, like a 22-year-old. And holy mama, she did. She took the bag with the three-pound chicken and looped it over her scooter handlebars and off she went.

I upped her allowance, of course, even though all she asked for was brownie points (I'm aware of the unfortunate racist heritage of the term, but our kids naturally assume they're related to brownies, so I don't worry about it too much).

Updates: well, our contractor is finally our of jail (I do love saying this in answer to people's chipper questions about how the renovation is coming), but not for long, so we're trying to get him to finish as much as he can before he goes out of commission. Sigh. I feel bad for the guy, even though he brought the vast majority of his troubles upon himself.

Also, Kevlar was invented by a woman.

Men who cry

Good morning on this glorious wintry Monday. It's hard not to be in a good mood when the sun is out for the first time in a week. (Or so it seems, and I know that for my Midwestern contingent a week is NOTHING. Still: GLORIOUS.) Last week, with the cold and the snow and the wow-really-MORE? snow, it felt like everything was in hibernation. The kids had two snow days, one of which was for cold (WIMPS, that school district. WIMPS.) (Okay, the high WAS -1 and they were worried about buses not starting). M and I, on the other had, had business-as-usual days (ARGH), so the snow days were 48 hours of frantic scrambling. Our builder, too, seemed to be asleep--he was in a fender bender on his way to work on Monday, which was followed by 7 days of silence and complete non-progress on the house. We finally tracked him down at his mom's house. Apparently his girlfriend had broken up with him and kicked him out of their house. Sigh. We have a very....emotionally connected builder, which I appreciate on the good days but not so much on the weepy ones. On those days I am reminded of Nora Ephron's warning about men who cry: "they're sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own."

Heh. In addition, our compassion is strained by also finding out last week, via a legal notice informing us that we're responsible (legally we are, it appears) for the unpaid bills to some of his subcontractors. LOVELY. I would be more distraught about this disturbing turn of events if a) the amount we're being requested for was larger and b) if I wasn't pretty confident that we could meet that debt by selling his damn stuff, which is still in our house. (Just kidding! that would be WRONG. As would some of the fantasies I entertained over the weekend of kidnapping him and not letting him leave our house until the trim was done). Anyway! It seems like he's come out of hibernation and will be coming to our house to face the wrath of M. I do not envy him.

In lighter news, Si's fourth grade class has begun their biography project. "Oh, who are you doing?" I asked with interest. Ben Franklin? Buzz Lightyear? Amelia Earhart?

"The man who invented the bulletproof vest."

Of course. One of the great minds of our times. I resisted sarcasm, however, and just said, "Oh! Great!" while making a serious effort not to sound like a pin had just punctured my mom balloon.

Ahh, the bowl fight

Yesterday our builder hooked up the kitchen faucet, which means that except for the really actually minor items like caulking and grout, the kitchen part of our house is D-O-N-E and we celebrated by baking a batch of cookies, which we haven't done since 1984. I mean, August. Helen was beside herself with chit-chattery excitement, spinning from mixing bowl to counter to oven and back again with a constant running commentary: "Aretheydoneyet?WhencanIlickthebowl? But Silas can't lick the bowl, right, because he wasn't here? What's that for? Are they done yet? Did you do the next batch? When you do the next one can I lick the bowl? Just me? I'm going to get a spoon. Just for licking, right, ma? What are these spoons for? Can I lick the spoon? But Silas can't, right? Are we going to have parties now? Whoa."

Meanwhile M and I were trying to have a conversation about how great it was to finally stand in the kitchen and have a conversation, Costi was trying to make the point that we hadn't fed her her after-dinner snack yet, and the birds (oh, the birds) were back in the living area, making their happy-to-be-here noises, and it was all so cheerful and noisy and warm that there was really no excuse for feeling tired and irritated, even though that's what I was mostly feeling.

Life is creeping back toward normal, in other words. Hurray. This was really brought home by the kids who, immediately after the celebration cookie baking, got into a fight over who got to lick the bowl (note: they BOTH get to lick the bowl. For Pete's sake.)

Dilemma and advice

I have a kid friendship question. Only I've pretty much already answered it in my own mind, so it's not really a question so much as fishing for reassurance.

Here's the deal: there's a kid in Si's class who has called him a couple of times this summer asking to play. He's never gotten through to Si personally; once he (actually, his dad, who was calling for him) talked to me; once he left a message. Si has been informed of these messages and has been nudged to call back, but he has shown zero interest in returning this kid's calls. Negative interest, even.

My normal position on Silas's social life is that I keep out of it. (Which is a separate question in and of itself: how much should I be interfering/ directing/ shaping Si's friendships?)

However, as the message-taker, I feel responsible. Also, I feel bad for the guy in his class. My sense is that he is not well-liked. Rumors get spread about him. All things being equal (when are they ever equal, though?) I think I would nudge Si a little harder about calling him back.

However--and here is where the water gets murky--I have a gut reaction toward this guy, and it is negative. I've been in Si's class. The kid is a little out of control. Also, I get reports like "people don't like X because he gets really mad and kicks people" and "X says he plays Nintendo until 3 a.m. and his parents just let him." Also, his parents: they are divorced, and his dad has clearly remarried a trophy wife. They seem like uncomfortable, dissipated people. This is based solely on gut instinct, meaning on sheer surface prejudices. I don't like that I do this. Nevertheless, it is the data with which I am working.

My charitable instincts (give the poor kid a chance) are at war with my parental instincts, which tell me this kid, however pitiable his home life, is unlikely to be a good influence. He's likely to engage in questionable behaviors in a playdate at his house and need extra supervision at a playdate at our house.

More data: I am myself a few-close-friends sort of person, not an embrace-a-wide-and-diverse-acquaintanceship person. I don't pursue or encourage friendships with women I don't like or don't trust. And I don't feel right pushing my children to do so, either. I try to enforce a rule of kindness, but there is a difference between being breezily polite/ friendly in a neutral location, like school, and inviting someone into your house.

I feel bad. But I'm not going to do it.

So What Does Twenty Hours in a Car with Three Kids Look Like, Anyway?

Kinda like this: we leave late (ALWAYS). By the time we're pulling out of town, at 4:30, the rain/snow has already begun. Craaaaap, I think. The kids are excited but remarkably good. One is READING. One is doing puzzles. One is playing Leapster. The key point: they are QUIET (even if one wakes from a little doze around Colorado Springs and asks, "Mom! Are we almost to Legoland?!")

Past Colorado Springs, it is dark (and snowing). The drive is slow (and snowing). But the kids are asleep (hallelujah). And the snow, it is blinding, but it isn't sticking, so we keep going. We go over Raton Pass into New Mexico, and it is starting to stick but at this point stopping isn't an option. By the time we get twenty minutes into New Mexico, there is no snow at all, and we pat ourselves on the back.

New Mexico passes in a dream. Later the kids will keep forgetting to count New Mexico when they list the states they've been in for this trip (and, ok, one kid's list goes like this: "Arizona--Legoland, California--New Zealand--what's that other one, mom? oh! and Fort Collins").

In Arizona we stop to geocache (a lot) and have some French Toast. Just before we get to California we stop again, to eat all of our Clementines. The kids are still being good, amusing themselves and mostly not fighting. Although the parents mostly mention this in the context of "Hey! You kids have been SO GOOD so far! Don't mess it up now!"

We geocache across Death Valley:

Stretch the legs, solve a puzzle, get new/ new-to-you toys: what's not to love?

We hit LA just before sunset on the second day. I'd like to say we drove directly to the coast:

It was approximately 35 degrees.

But instead we descended upon the aunt of M and my SIL, completely covered her living room floor with sleeping gear, and got ready to do things like this:

Note: $14 facepaint job was gone within three hours.

All in all, not bad. The one-hour drive to Legoland the next day was VASTLY harder.

Chores

I bribed Silas to rake the front lawn yesterday. Five bucks. That's big money in our house. And I tried to keep my expectations low: I remembered Swistle's excellent comment about when her two bigger kids help out: they are not very efficient or effective, and if they were a tool from Target she would totally ask for her money back, but the little bit that they can do is helpful. Plus, I reminded myself, there's the "building character" factor, although I've never been clear if this factor is negated if you pay the children. I vote no. Because as much as I wishity wish it, my kids aren't going to help out just from the sheer joy of contributing to the household.

But: he did it. The lawn actually looks raked this morning. Not, er, well-raked, but still: raked. Most of the grass is visible again. And there's an enormous pile of leaves in the back, covering up the half of the yard upon which grass does not grow. I haven't figured out a good way to measure Si's character, but I'm confident that it is bigger, or shinier, or whatever happens to it when it gets "built."

These are the kind of chore in which Si excels, anyway. Big, fun, messy, and--most important--limited. Bribery is like antibiotics to this kid: you can't prescribe it too often, or it loses its effectiveness. We tried paying him to mow the lawn (with a nonmotorized push mower, CPS people) last summer, and it worked great for about two times. Then he couldn't be bothered. Same with loading the dishwasher. "Again?" he wails, which I totally get, but still can't really sympathize. And of course we make both kids pick up their crap and put away their laundry. But overall, we're having less success with getting helping out around the house to become part of the daily routine. Chore charts are effective, but again only for about two weeks, and then we all start forgetting to fill them out. As much as I have always admired color-coordinated family chore calendars ("Joe washes the dishes on Tuesdays and Fridays, Ruth on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and Karin and Katey on Saturday and Sunday," etc.) I have never been able to actually write one out. It makes me feel a) controlling and b) like a total dork. And no matter what sort of chore arrangement we have as a family, "nagging" always seems to be my job.

What about you? How do you handle household chores?

Tink, tink, tink, tink

...tink, tink, tink, tink, tink...

So, Silas found a pick (an ice pick? a climber's pick?) within about an hour of hour arriving at the cabin on Friday night. He finally, and reluctantly, relinquished it at approximately 1 pm on Sunday, when we got in the car to go home (Word of WisdomTM: ice picks + children + car = no). For those of you that can do the math, that's, oh, about 132 straight hours of hammering. All of the rocks around the cabin we stayed in now have little white marks on them. Also all of the rocks along the creek at the bottom of the hill. That kid has persistence, and also, apparently, gold fever. That's what he was doing, by the way: mining for gold. (Only 149 years too late! Sorry, kiddo!)

But! It was a wonderful weekend, nevertheless. We stayed at one of the cabins around the Glen Isle resort, which is a moldering old marvel of a historical lodge, with cheap cabins, lots of roads and trails, and easy access to the north fork of the Platte (and easier access to the little creek that empties into the north fork, which was a load off for the lazy parents among our group, which was all of us.) Hubs worked, I read the old magazines laying about the cabin, and my sister-in-law slept. Helen colored like a madwoman, at least when she wasn't out monitoring Si's progress. Their cousin kept tabs on the comings and goings of all visitors.

Every so often Hubs and I wish we had the means to buy some property in the mountains--to get ourselves a real summer cabin, something we can return to again and again, and pass down to the kids, a tangible piece of what I sometimes call their Colorado Heritage (usually while dragging them up a glacier or down a canyon). When I was growing up, I spent a few weeks every summer at the summer house of a friend, swimming, boating, and running wild in the woods, and it breaks my heart, sometimes, that we don't have the time or the means to provide this kind of summer to our kids. So far we haven't had any luck finding them friends with summer cabins, and short of winning the lottery, there's no way we're ever going to own a cabin. (Damn real estate bubble hasn't burst enough).

Then we go have a weekend the one just passed, and I start to think: who needs a damn cabin, anyway? It would be nothing but work, all summer long (that's what my friend's parents were doing, after all, while we swam and boated and ran wild. They were scraping and painting and floating out docks and fixing outboard motors and digging out privies and cooking, cleaning, and fixing ALL SUMMER LONG). Meanwhile, for about a hundredth of the price, we can go rent a cabin on the weekends we actually have available, and give our kids the gift of the whole entire state.

So. I haven't totally given up on the dream of a mountain cabin, but given the circumstances, I'm thinking we may actually have found a workable alternative.

Children are Different: the List

1. One of my children slept poorly. He/she hated to go to sleep, hated to wake up, and as soon as he/she could move came into our room in the middle of every night. He/she still does this.

2. One of my children slept great. Even in the hospital, he/she slept like a little baby log for hours at a stretch. He/she still sleeps great.

3. One of my children is afraid of very little except house fires. He/she watches scary movies, picks up biting bugs, climbs on the roof by him- or herself.

4. Interestingly, this is not the one who sleeps well.

5. The good sleeper, however, is not so good a sleeping companion. He/she flops, kicks, squeaks and sleep-talks, all while fast asleep.

6. The poor sleeper, once asleep, is difficult to wake.

7. Unless the smoke alarm goes off.

8. One of my children will eat anything, more or less (although see #9/10). The other child will commonly refuse dessert, especially if it comes with conditions, like eating something that has been contaminated by parsley or other leafy foods.

9. One of my children loves meat and his/her favorite dish is a big hunk of beef or salmon. He/she hates salad. Salad makes him/her cry.

10. One my children loves salad and his/her favorite dish is a taco salad. He/she hates unadulterated chunks of meat or fish. These make him/her cry.

11. I've kind of given up trying to cook meals that make everyone happy. Instead, I stuff eggplant with mushrooms and sundried tomatoes and refuse to make an alternative dinner.

12. This makes everyone cry. Even me. It turns out I don't like eggplant, either.